


Waiting For Love

by TheGeekProblem



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Introspection, Missing Scene, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:00:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26224570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGeekProblem/pseuds/TheGeekProblem
Summary: "Do you ever remember it? Two thousand years waiting for Amy? The Last Centurion.""No""Are you lying?""Of course I'm lying"Rory remembers what it was like to wait for 2000 years. Sometimes it weights on him.
Relationships: Amy Pond/Rory Williams
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	Waiting For Love

**Author's Note:**

> I always thought it was really downplayed the 2000 years waiting of Rory, so I decided to write how much those years influenced and changed him.
> 
> I wanted to write something about Rory for ages, he's one of my favourite companions and since I started my rewatch this is the work I've been looking forward to write.

He still caught himself praying to Jupiter and Mars.

It was stupid, really, and it wasn’t often, but he still did it. He was 2000 years old, at least mentally, he had lived more time outside the Roman Empire than in it, but it was so ingrained in who he was now that he couldn’t stop it. He had been a roman, an educated roman, a trained soldier, a high ranking officer, a centurion. Inside his head he had knowledge of battle strategies and fighting skills, and names of Gods and Goddesses, and traditions and a life lived in Rome, all beside his 21st Century knowledge and life lived in Leadworth.

Sometimes he caught himself counting the people that surrounded him and evaluating the threat they represented, other times he felt like there was some weight missing by his side where he would rest his right hand, and then there were the rare cases where he said something and whoever he was with would look at him funny and then he would realize he had been talking in latin.

He didn’t have panic attacks anymore, he had worked them out around the time he reached the 21st Century and had learned how to compartmentalize and keep everything behind a neat little door, but these accidents always unsettled him and left him feeling off the rest of the day. But he wasn’t always able to keep the door shut. While he was conscious the memories were mostly under his control, but whenever he went to sleep there was always a possibility the door would start to leak. There were nights where he would wake up from nightmares and he knew he wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. 

He never woke up violently, never screamed. He would wake up a little startled and would breathe deep, he would make sure Amy was still asleep beside him and he would go to sit in the armchair in their room and look at her sleeping, and he would spend the rest of the night there, and when morning came he would return to bed and ‘wake up’ beside Amy and she wouldn’t know a thing. He had perfected the routine by now. 

It always calmed him down, looking at her face, knowing she was only sleeping and in the morning he would see her smile at him and hear her voice. It was soothing, looking at her chest rise and fall with the rhythm of her breathing, hearing the little snores she made while sleeping. When he was waiting he used to talk to the Pandorica, even when he knew that inside the box Amy wasn’t aware of the world outside and couldn’t hear him, and it had kept him sane. During those years the only thing that kept him going was knowing that he would see Amy again, so now looking at her was a bonus. He had learned patience and how to stay out of trouble. And during those nights he prayed, prayed to the Gods to let him keep this, keep her. The romans had a saying,  _ Fortuna caeca est _ , luck is blind. Right now he felt like the luckiest guy in the world, but who knew what tomorrow would bring. The statues of the goddess Fortuna always had a blindfold, except for one he had seen a long time ago, she had her eyes opened and had a hint of a smile. He thought in that moment that maybe the Gods weren’t temperamental and maybe Fortuna was looking out for him.

He wondered how the Doctor did it? How he lived with so much loss? Live with so many memories. Memories of war and pain and suffering and loneliness. He was older than the Doctor, mentally, and he could barely cope, so he wondered how he did it. They now had a special type of kinship (a war was a war no matter where you fought it, space or earth), and they knew each other’s tells. The Doctor would walk loudly if he came from somewhere Rory couldn’t see, just as Rory would announce his presence in the room. Rory knew what that far away look meant,  _ the thousand yard stare _ it was called, and he knew it was his queue to stop Amy’s questions and leave the Doctor to his thoughts. He sometimes tried to rest his right hand in a weapon that wasn’t there, and the Doctor would extend his hand to hold onto someone that wasn’t there, and then they both would do this awkward movement of clenching and unclenching their hands until the need was gone. The Doctor never told Amy about his retained memories, just like he never would.

They never talked about it and probably never will, but it was a comfort knowing there was someone out there who understood him. Maybe that’s the reason he had companions with him. Maybe the way to keep going was finding someone, someone like Amy. 

Amy, his beacon of hope in the dark. She wasn’t perfect, not by any chance. She had her moods, and she was stubborn, but she also was a good person and she always made him feel better when he was feeling down. He loved her smile and her laugh, her hair and her smell, everything that made her the way she was. He loved how grumpy she was in the mornings and how she preferred coffee instead of tea. He loved the small moments where they would cook together without really talking or when they just lay on the sofa watching telly. The moments where they wouldn’t really talk but they would just exist in each other’s orbit.

And maybe that’s how you keep going, you latch on to the good things, the little things and hope they can outdone the bad. That they can outdone years of pain and loss.

And during all those sleepless nights, where he was surrounded in a world of darkness, where no one was there to judge any of his actions, he prayed. He prayed to Jupiter, Juno and Fortuna to thank them for their gifts. He prayed to the Gods and Goddesses he no longer believed in, prayed in a language he no longer spoke in, prayed with gratitude for his good fortune, gratitude for their many blessings. And even if he didn’t believe in them anymore, he felt lighter by the end. Felt hopeful that everything was going to be okay.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Comments and Kudos are always super welcome.
> 
> (Did you notice how I added the whole Stone Rose thing??? sneaky, right?? Not really)
> 
> [Twitter](https://twitter.com/thegeekproblem)  
> [Tumblr](https://thegeekproblem.tumblr.com)


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